As a city kid, I tend to think of spring in abstractions.  The city workers are grooming the parks in time for summer.  The open window on the streetcar is a welcome sign of life shedding its many forms of protection.  I need to get my bike tuned up.  Maybe I’ll find a patio and have that pint.

I spent the last day of April at Dingo Farms and May was on my mind.  But at Dingo, there are different signs of spring than there are in the city.  Piglets being born, new mothers learning to nurse, sucker fish running up from the Holland Marsh as the current quickens due to an increase in run off from melting snow.  The back wood is full of fiddleheads and the pine forest is a carpet of wild leek.

At this time of year the farm is full of trepidation about the frailty of things:  Will the clouds clear?  Will the rest of the litter arrive?  Will the ground firm up?  But at the same time, it is full of hope:  How much sun will we get?  How many will be in the litter? 

This farm is a community, complete with life’s spectrum of triumphs, anxieties and hard won victories.  Just the night before, a young calf had a difficult entry into the world, a litter of baby rabbits were born, as was a single piglet.  The barn was full of a simple emotion.   Ben, Spencer and Uncle Buck prepared equipment to till the field as soon as the wet earth was firm enough to handle the weight of the tractor. 

It’s funny too how in the city at this time of year I don’t mind waiting a little bit for the streetcar: it’s just so damn nice outside.  There’s no ice to slip on, no slush to schlop in.  Soon there will be ice cream and falling asleep under a tree.  In the city, we have our version of spring but the simple emotion is the same: there is life after winter.

As the sun goes down air gets a cold that in Toronto would seem bitter but at the farm seems an embrace.  Hugged into the house, we began to prepare meals: one for that night and a few for the next day, Emma’s First Communion.  Relatives will arrive and they need to eat.  Luckily there’s lots of food around. 

So many modern foods are a result of the abundance of food that often happens in a farmhouse.  Two dozen eggs everyday in a family of seven is still three eggs a day per person.  That kind of consistency caused us to invent the omelet, meringue, soufflé and mayonnaise.  “Mayonaisse,” asks Emma, “you make that with eggs?”

Farms are a place so ancient that we forget how much they’ve given us; but they are not without modernity.  Tractors have GPS and iPod docks.  And farm kitchens have food processors.  “This isn’t exactly how my grandmother made it,” I confess to Emma, “but she would have done it this way if she could,” I promise. 

We’ve cracked two eggs into the bowl of the food processor.  We add two mustards: the one Emma likes and the one Spencer likes.  A little lemon juice, and don’t tell me it’s not local because I was on a farm and they had some.

It takes a family to run a farm but more than a family to eat all that it produces and I think that works out quite well for you and me.